Arts at MIT

A big round of applause for MIT graduate students Coco Allred SMACT ‘26 (), C Jacob Payne MArch ‘27 (), Jessica Stringham SM ‘26 (), and Harrison White MArch ‘27, who are the 2026 recipients of the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts! 🥳

Allred designs interactive environments that turn solitary acts like drawing and weaving into collaborative ones, with work featured at the Kaunas Biennale. Payne builds architectural models and culinary devices that draw on overlooked histories, including a model evoking the vanished world of Southern juke joints. Stringham creates real-time visuals through live coding, performing in venues around the world using Murrelet, an open-source framework they built. And White fabricates objects that subvert material expectations, like baseball bats finished in industrial lacquer and chairs made from steel strips destined for kitchen sinks.

The winners’ work will be featured in an upcoming Wiesner Student Art Gallery exhibition.

📸 Images courtesy of the artists
🔗 Read more about the winners at the link in bio

Bravo to Xinyu Xu ‘26 () for taking home the 2026 Louis Sudler Prize! 🎆

A lighting designer, technical director, carpenter, pianist, and director, Xu came to MIT planning to study computation and cognition until a production of Tick, Tick… Boom changed everything. She switched her major to Theater Arts and never looked back, going on to co-design lighting for the multimedia dance Volta and to light and associate-direct Jay Scheib’s () six-and-a-half-hour epic A Dream Like a Dream as her senior thesis. “No one goes to theater to see the lights,” she says. “But you can’t see the show without lights. For me, the stage feels like a canvas.”

The Sudler Prize is presented annually to a graduating senior who has demonstrated excellence and the highest standards of proficiency in music, theater, painting, sculpture, design, architecture, or film.

📸 Images courtesy of the artist
🔗 Read more about Xu at the link in bio

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Congratulations to Bench Space (Yuki Gray MArch ‘27 and Sam Grunebaum) on winning the 2026 MIT Arts Startup Incubator! The platform connects makers and artists to short-term studio and workshop rentals, and took home the $15,000 first prize.

Five finalist teams each had five minutes to pitch their creative ventures to a panel of expert judges at the MIT Welcome Center on April 30. Alongside Bench Space, the finalists included an AI-powered interior design procurement tool, an interactive jazz practice platform, a virtual user-testing system for app designers, and a trust infrastructure for the contemporary art market. The four other semifinalist teams received $2,500 each.

Launched in 2013, the Arts Startup Incubator is a yearlong program that gives students the structure, mentorship, and peer feedback to turn arts-based business ideas into viable ventures.

🔗 Read more about all five teams at the link in bio
📸 Credit HErickson/MIT

Congratulations to the four recipients of the 2026 Laya and Jerome B. Wiesner Student Art Awards: Clay Lewis ‘26 ( claylewis_), Andrea Marcano-Delgado PhD ‘26 (), Perry Naseck SM ‘25 (), and Gloria Zhu ‘26 ()! 🎉

Lewis, a music major with a minor in computer science, composed scores for the Logarhythms’ () films and is headed to USC’s screen scoring program. Marcano-Delgado balanced a PhD in chemical biology with a deepening vocal jazz practice, co-founding the MIT Afro Latin Ensemble along the way. Naseck, a Media Lab PhD student, has become the de facto lighting designer for the Thomas Tull Concert Hall while researching live concert visuals for improvised and AI-generated music. And Zhu, a double major in computer science and art and design, created metal wearables featured at the MIT Gala () and has mentored fellow students in MIT’s makerspaces for three years.

Named for past MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner and Laya Wiesner, these awards have honored students whose artistic contributions enrich campus life since 1979.

📸 Images courtesy of the artists
🔗 Learn more about the student artists at the link in bio

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Meet the five finalist teams competing for $15,000 in MIT’s Arts Startup Incubator pitch event!

Bench Space (Samuel Grunebaum, Yuki Gray) connects makers and artists to short-term studio and workshop rentals, unlocking idle creative spaces and making them more affordable and accessible to all.

Cognify (Muhammad Hamza Mubashir) is a design intelligence tool that simulates interactions so design teams make faster, data-driven design choices.

Neural Notes (Mike Jiang) is an AI-powered music platform that transforms isolated practice time into interactive music-making, making it more engaging for musicians to improve and keep playing.

Rinovo (Zoe De Simone) is an AI-powered interior design platform that automates the procurement process, reducing project costs and timelines to expand creative output.

Sóter (Alvaro and Jorge Jimenez de Andrade) solves art market opacity with digital passports, giving artwork a digital identity, ensuring traceability and security in every transaction.

Come cheer them on Thursday, Apr 30, at 5pm in the MIT Welcome Center!

📸 Photo credit HErickson/MIT

Juke: Built Off the Record, a new exhibition in MIT’s Wiesner Student Art Gallery, reconstructs historic juke joints: the informal gathering spaces built by African American communities across the rural South during Jim Crow segregation. Through drawings, scale models, and installation developed from photographs and field research, MArch student C Jacob Payne () translates fragmentary historical evidence into spatial form, reexamining these overlooked environments as works of architecture and cultural memory.

On view through April 24, open daily 9am–9pm
Work by C Jacob Payne MArch ‘27

📸 Image credit Andy Ryan and Qingyang Xie (.xp)

“Hiii-iii! I’m Spider Rabbit,” beams the man in white coveralls, floppy paper ears, and chalky face paint. Played in March to a packed house at MIT and currently at La MaMa in New York, Spider Rabbit is a surreal solo one-act by poet Michael McClure, brought to life by MIT senior lecturer Dan Safer and actor Tony Torn.

The pair spent an intensive week on campus working with creative collaborators and MIT students to develop a production they’d begun building together a few years ago. For Torn, who taught acting at the Institute a few years ago, the chance to work with students again was a perk of rehearsing on campus. Students like Joy Ma ‘25, completing an MEng after earning her bachelor’s in physics and computer science, joined the production team during rehearsals—one of over 10 theater classes she’s taken at MIT. As Torn puts it, “once [MIT students] see theater as a different kind of creative problem to be solved, they immediately lock in.”

Spider Rabbit is now playing at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York through April 12.

🔗 Read the full story at the link in our bio
📸 Photos by Ben Rose/MIT and HErickson/MIT